The posters for the ongoing Masters of Music concert series at the Emerson Center may look like an ad for AARP. But the appearances of pop music artists Livingston Taylor, 64, John Sebastian, 70, and Janis Ian, 63, are drawing sizable crowds – some 500 came to hear Taylor’s set, and sales are good enough for John Sebastian this Saturday that organizers have announced a second series next year.
Masters of Music is targeting an audience that even in late middle age is a full generation younger than that typical at other Vero cultural events.
Music promoter and part-time Vero resident Rusty Young doesn’t mince words to fans of older artists, his specialty. “If they want to see them perform, they better go now,” he warns.
For several seasons, Young has been bringing acts appealing to the 60-something demographic to the Sunrise Theatre in Fort Pierce – mostly recently, Dave Mason and his band, who played in November.
Like his artists and audiences, Young himself is enjoying something of a sunset in his career, scaling back his scope in a field he only started in at age 50. Rather than booking acts across the country, the former business consultant is now concentrating on Florida.
“When I first started I spread myself too thin. I was doing shows in New York, Chicago, New Jersey and Los Angeles. Now I prefer to do as many shows as I can in Florida,” he says.
In addition to the Sunrise, Young books at Delray Beach’s Crest Theater, part of the Delray Center for the Arts; Miami Beach’s Colony Theatre; the Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale, and the Coral Springs Center for the Arts, as well as venues on Florida’s west coast.
And to those, he is adding Emerson on Vero’s mainland, hoping that the Masters of Music series is successful and could even be expanded to other venues here, both larger and smaller, depending on the act.
“In each market there are different demographics and different interests in music. My sweet spot happens to be a demographic between 55 and 80 who has time and discretionary income and wants to be entertained by an artist that they were exposed to when they were younger,” says Young. “In most of the markets I work in, that demographic is available to me and that’s why I concentrate on that.”
Many of his artists got their start in the 1960s and ‘70s. “Rap, country, that’s not me,” says Young.
Young says he has been informally advising the board of directors of Sunrise Theatre, which reopened in 2006 after extensive renovation. Like theaters in other communities, Young says, Sunrise’s ticket sales cover only half of its operating expenses. Funding must come from a combination of grants, donors and fundraising events to keep their doors open.
As for the success of any particular performance, Young says four things are critical. “You’ve got to have the right act in the right market on the right day at the right price,” he says. In addition to independent music promoters and production companies like himself, or like Darryl Bey’s Fort Pierce-based Bluebird Productions, Sunrise itself also books its own acts.
“We’re friendly competitors,” Young says. “They are a theater that books talent and I’m a music promoter that books talent and then tries to get them into a theater.”
Fort Pierce, he says, is a “city without pretense” and allowed him a foothold on the Treasure Coast.
“When I decided I wanted to show in this market, I went to the Sunrise and just had a great experience,” says Young. “Their marketing people have been great. (Executive director) John Wilkes has been great. It was a great way to get introduced into the Vero market.”
Young comes from a background in business, not music. Though his brother Christopher Young is a well-known composer of film scores in Hollywood, Rusty earned a degree in business and theater from Rutgers University and got a job working as a strategic services consultant with a large accounting firm. He was a managing partner, when, at 50, he radically changed career paths.
He turned his attention to restoring a theater in his hometown of Red Bank, New Jersey. For seven years, he helped raise money for a massive renovation of the Count Basie Theatre, which, just as the Sunrise, once hosted vaudeville and movies. As CEO and founder of the Count Basie Theatre Foundation, he began staging music concerts in 2009 to raise money for the $20 million renovation.
Young’s interest in preserving the theater wasn’t isolated. The cause attracted huge stars including Bruce Springsteen, who performed a 2008 benefit concert for the renovation. His wife, Patti Scialfa, was on the theater’s board.
Judy Collins also performed for the Count Basie in 2012.
Along with helping the theater, those concerts eventually led to the creation of MusicWorks, Young’s music promotion company. It has both a for-profit and a non-profit division, in which a portion of the ticket sales goes back to the venue or some other non-profit organization.
Last week, Young was at a major music convention in New York, the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters, or APAP, meeting where people representing artists set up booths in a Hilton hotel hoping to connect with opportunities to perform.
“I was there mostly for relationship-building,” says Young. “Agents and managers are the lifeline of these acts, and they’re my connection to the artists.”
He talked to various agents there, asking after acoustic acts that might fit at Emerson Center, where he’s hoping the new concerts sell well.
Young and longtime Vero PR agents Bev and Marty Paris pitched Masters of Music as a series last fall, the thinking being that if people buy season tickets for Emerson’s speaker series, they might also buy a season of popular music concerts.
Livingston Taylor, younger brother of James, has performed for nearly as long as his better-known brother, and is also an accomplished songwriter. Janis Ian, who was 13 when she wrote and recorded “Society’s Child,” about an interracial relationship, continued to write music that was well-received and recorded by major stars including Roberta Flack, and in 1975 wrote and recorded “At Seventeen,” another massive hit.
And John Sebastian, a founder of the Lovin’ Spoonful, grew up in a musical family with friends that included Woodie Guthrie. That band was known for hits like “Do You Believe in Magic?” and “Summer in the City.”
The Emerson Center is owned by the local Unitarian Universalist congregation, which holds Sunday services in the same hall where the Masters of Music perform. In addition to the speaker series, the center also hosts the free Florida Humanities Series, a social justice film series and the occasional play or cabaret act – next Saturday, Jan. 24, for example, the Vero chapter of AAUW, the American Association of University Women, is hosting a one-woman play at Emerson Center, “Tea for Three,” about American first ladies.
But it has not regularly held concerts of pop music, nor has any other Vero venue apart from bars.
Last April, Young brought Judy Collins to the Emerson Center in a concert, and used the Paris firm for marketing. When they saw it was well-attended, they decided to go forward with the series this year as a joint production effort.
Meanwhile, Young is using Vero as his Florida office; he and his wife, Sug, a jewelry designer, recently rented an apartment over the shops on Ocean Drive.
It’s a good way to keep tabs on his prospective audience – out the front window, passing below.
”I was listening to an Eric Clapton interview, and he talked about his reunion with Cream at Royal Albert Hall. The interviewer asked him, ’So why did you decide to do this concert?’ And he answered, ‘Well, we’re still alive.’
“It’s ‘carpe diem’ for these guys,” says Young. “You have to seize the day. Like the shows I do – you want to see Judy Collins, John Sebastian? You better go now.”